War

by Roald Dahl

  Nairobi

  18 December 1939

  Dear Mama,

  Well, everything here is also going very smoothly. I did my first solo flight some days ago and now go up alone for longish periods every day. I’ve just learnt to loop the loop and spin and the next thing we’ve got to do is flying upside down, which isn’t quite so funny. But it’s all marvellous fun …

  The great flying-boat flew low for the whole of the long journey, and as we passed over the wild and barren lands where Kenya meets the Sudan we saw literally hundreds of elephant. They seemed to move around in herds of about twenty, always with a mighty bull tusker leading the herd and with the cows and their babies in the rear. Never, I kept reminding myself as I peered down through the small round window of the flying-boat, never will I see anything like this again.

  Soon we found the upper reaches of the Nile and followed it down to Wadi Halfa, where we landed to refuel. Wadi Halfa then was one corrugated-iron shed with a lot of 44-gallon drums of petrol lying around, and the river was narrow and very fast. We all marvelled at the skill of the pilot as he put the great lumbering flying-machine down on that rushing strip of water.

  In Cairo we landed on a very different Nile, wide and sluggish, and we were shuttled ashore and taken to Heliopolis aerodrome and put on board a monstrous and ancient transport plane whose wings were joined together with bits of wire.

  ‘Where are they taking us to?’ we asked.

  ‘To Iraq,’ they answered, ‘and jolly good luck to you all.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘We mean that you are going to Habbaniya in Iraq and Habbaniya is the most godforsaken hell-hole in the entire world,’ they said, smirking. ‘It is where you will stay for six months to complete your advanced flying training, after which you will be ready to join a squadron and face the enemy.’

  Habbaniya

  20 February 1940

  Dear Mama,

  Here is a not very good photo taken of me in the streets of Cairo by one of those men who pop up from behind a public lavatory and snap you and hand you a bit of paper telling you to call tomorrow for the print …

  Unless you had been there and seen it with your own eyes you could not believe that a place like Habbaniya existed. It was a vast assemblage of hangars and Nissen huts and brick bungalows set slap in the middle of a boiling desert on the banks of the muddy Euphrates river miles from anywhere. The nearest place to it was Baghdad, about 100 miles to the north.

  This amazing and nonsensical RAF outpost was colossal. It was at least a mile long on each of its four sides, and there were paved streets called Bond Street and Regent Street and Tottenham Court Road. There were hospitals and dental surgeries and canteens and recreation halls and I don’t know how many thousands of men lived there. What they did I never discovered. It was beyond me why anyone should want to build a vast RAF town in such an abominable, unhealthy, desolate place as Habbaniya.

  Habbaniya

  10 July 1940

  Dear Mama,

  We’ve been here nearly 5 months now, and as we get nearer and nearer to the time when our course is finished and we go elsewhere we get more and more thrilled. It will be curious to see ordinary men and actual women doing ordinary things in ordinary places once more, to call a taxi or use the telephone; to order what you want to eat or to see a train; to go up a flight of stairs or see a row of houses. All these things and many more I shall derive the very greatest pleasure from doing …

  At Habbaniya we flew from dawn until 11 a.m. After that, as the temperature in the shade moved up towards 115°F, everyone had to stay indoors until it cooled down again. We were flying more powerful planes now, Hawker Harts with Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, and everything became suddenly much more serious. The Harts had machine-guns on their wings and we would practise shooting down the enemy by firing at a canvas drogue towed behind another plane.

  My Log Book tells me that we were at Habbaniya from 20 February 1940 to 20 August 1940, for exactly six months, and apart from the flying which was always exhilarating, it was a pretty tedious period of my young life. There were minor excitements now and then to relieve the boredom such as the flooding of the Euphrates when we had to evacuate the entire camp to a windswept plateau for ten days. People got stung by scorpions and went into hospital for a while to recover. The Iraqi tribesmen sometimes took pot shots at us from the surrounding hills. Men occasionally got heatstroke and had to be packed in ice. Everyone suffered from prickly heat and itched all over for much of the time.

  But eventually we got our wings and were judged ready to move on and confront the real enemy. About one half of the sixteen of us were given commissions and promoted to the rank of Pilot Officer. The other half were made Sergeant Pilots, though how this rather arbitrary class-conscious division was made I never knew. We were also divided up into fighter pilots or bomber pilots, fliers either of single-engined planes or twins. I became a Pilot Officer and a fighter pilot. Then all sixteen of us said goodbye to one another and were whisked off in many different directions.

  I found myself at a large RAF station on the Suez Canal called Ismailia, where they told me that I had been posted to 80 Squadron who were flying Gladiators against the Italians in the Western Desert of Libya. The Gloster Gladiator was an out-of-date fighter biplane with a radial engine. Back in England at that time, all the fighter boys were flying Hurricanes and Spitfires, but they were not sending any of those little beauties out to us in the Middle East quite yet.

  The Gladiator was armed with two fixed machine-guns, and these actually fired bullets through the revolving propeller. To me, this was about the greatest piece of magic I had ever seen in my life. I simply could not understand how two machine-guns firing thousands of bullets a minute could be synchronized to fire their bullets through a propeller revolving at thousands of revs a minute without hitting the propeller blades. I was told it had something to do with a little oil pipe and that the propeller shaft communicated with the machine-guns by sending pulses along the pipe, but more than that I cannot tell you.

  At Ismailia, a rather supercilious Flight-Lieutenant pointed to a parked Gladiator on the tarmac and said to me, ‘That one’s yours. You’ll be flying it out to your squadron tomorrow.’

  ‘Who will teach me how to fly it?’ I asked, trembling.

  ‘Don’t be an ass,’ he said. ‘How can anyone teach you when there’s only one cockpit? Just get in and do a few circuits and bumps and you’ll soon get the hang of it. You had better get all the practice you can because the next thing you know you’ll be dicing in the air with some clever little Italian who will be trying to shoot you down.’

  I remember thinking at the time that this was surely not the right way of doing things. They had spent eight months and a great deal of money training me to fly and suddenly that was the end of it all. Nobody in Ismailia was going to teach me anything about air-to-air combat, and they were certainly not going to take time off to instruct me when I joined a busy operational squadron. There is no question that we were flung in at the deep end, totally unprepared for actual fighting in the air, and this, in my opinion, accounted for the very great losses of young pilots that we suffered out there. I myself survived only by the skin of my teeth.

  Survival

  Some forty years ago I described in a story called ‘A Piece of Cake’ what it was like to find myself strapped firmly into the cockpit of my Gladiator with a fractured skull and a bashed-in face and a fuzzy mind while the crashed plane was going up in flames on the sands of the Western Desert. But there is an aspect of that story that I feel ought to be clarified by me and it is this. There seems, on re-reading it, to be an implication that I was shot down by enemy action, and if I remember rightly, this was inserted by the editors of an American magazine called the Saturday Evening Post who originally bought and published it. Those were the war years and the more dramatic the story, the better it was. They actually called it ‘Shot Down in Libya’, so you can see what they
were getting at. The fact is that my crash had nothing whatsoever to do with enemy action. I was not shot down either by another plane or from the ground. Here is what happened.

  I had climbed into my new Gladiator at an RAF airfield called Abu Suweir on the Suez Canal, and had set off alone to join 80 Squadron in the Western Desert. This was going to be my very first venture into combat territory. The date was 19 September 1940. They told me to fly across the Nile delta and land at a small airfield called Amiriya, near Alexandria, to refuel. Then I should fly on and land again at a bomber airfield in Libya called Fouka for a second refuelling. At Fouka I was to report to the Commanding Officer who would tell me precisely where 80 Squadron were at that moment, and I would then fly on and join them. A forward airfield in the Western Desert was in those days never much more than a strip of sand surrounded by tents and parked aircraft, and these airfields were being moved very frequently from one site to another, depending on whether the front line of the army was advancing or retreating.

  The flight in itself was a fairly daunting one for someone who had virtually no experience of the aircraft he was flying and none at all of flying long distances over Egypt and Libya with no navigational aids to help him. I had no radio. All I had was a map strapped to one knee. It took me one hour exactly to get from Abu Suweir to Amiriya where I landed with some difficulty in a sandstorm. But I got my plane refuelled and set off as quickly as I could for Fouka. I landed at Fouka fifty-five minutes later (all these times are meticulously recorded in my Log Book) and reported to the CO in his tent. He made some calls on his field telephone and then asked me for my map.

  ‘Eighty Squadron are now there,’ he said, pointing to a spot in the middle of the desert about thirty miles due south of the small coastal town of Mersah Matrûh.

  ‘Will it be easy to see?’ I asked him.

  ‘You can’t miss it,’ he said. ‘You’ll see the tents and about fifteen Gladiators parked around the place. You can spot it from miles away.’ I thanked him and went off to calculate my course and distance.

  The time was 6.15 p.m. when I took off from Fouka for 80 Squadron’s landing strip. I estimated my flight time to be fifty minutes at the most. That would give me fifteen or twenty minutes to spare before darkness fell, which should be ample.

  I flew straight for the point where the 80 Squadron airfield should have been. It wasn’t there. I flew around the area to the north, south, east and west, but there was not a sign of an airfield. Below me there was nothing but empty desert, and rather rugged desert at that, full of large stones and boulders and gullies.

  At this point, dusk began to fall and I realized that I was in trouble. My fuel was running low and there was no way I could get back to Fouka on what I had left. I couldn’t have found it in the dark anyway. The only course open to me now was to make a forced landing in the desert and make it quickly, before it was too dark to see.

  I skimmed low over the boulder-strewn desert searching for just one small strip of reasonably flat sand on which to land. I knew the direction of the wind so I knew precisely the direction that my approach should take. But where, oh where was there one little patch of desert that was clear of boulders and gullies and lumps of rock. There simply wasn’t one. It was nearly dark now. I had to get down somehow or other. I chose a piece of ground that seemed to me to be as boulder-free as any and I made an approach. I came in as slowly as I dared, hanging on the prop, travelling just above my stalling speed of eighty miles an hour. My wheels touched down. I throttled back and prayed for a bit of luck.

  I didn’t get it. My undercarriage hit a boulder and collapsed completely and the Gladiator buried its nose in the sand at what must have been about seventy-five miles an hour.

  My injuries in that bust-up came from my head being thrown forward violently against the reflector-sight when the plane hit the ground (in spite of the fact that I was strapped tightly, as always, into the cockpit), and apart from the skull fracture, the blow pushed my nose in and knocked out a few teeth and blinded me completely for days to come.

  It is odd that I can remember very clearly quite a few of the things that followed seconds after the crash. Obviously I was unconscious for some moments, but I must have recovered my senses very quickly because I can remember hearing a mighty whoosh as the petrol tank in the port wing exploded, followed almost at once by another mighty whoosh as the starboard tank went up in flames. I could see nothing at all, and I felt no pain. All I wanted was to go gently off to sleep and to hell with the flames. But soon a tremendous heat around my legs galvanized my soggy brain into action. With great difficulty I managed to undo first my seat-straps and then the straps of my parachute, and I can even remember the desperate effort it took to push myself upright in the cockpit and roll out head first on to the sand below. Again I wanted to lie down and doze off, but the heat close by was terrific and had I stayed where I was I should simply have been roasted alive. I began very very slowly to drag myself away from the awful hotness. I heard my machine-gun ammunition exploding in the flames and the bullets were pinging about all over the place but that didn’t worry me. All I wanted was to get away from the tremendous heat and rest in peace. The world about me was divided sharply down the middle into two halves. Both of these halves were pitch black, but one was scorching-hot and the other was not. I had to keep on dragging myself away from the scorching-hot side and into the cooler one, and this took a long time and enormous effort, but in the end the temperature all around me became bearable. When that happened I collapsed and went to sleep.

  It was revealed at an inquiry into my crash held later that the CO at Fouka had given me totally wrong information. Eighty Squadron had never been in the position I was sent to. They were fifty miles to the south, and the place to which I had been sent was actually no-man’s-land, which was a strip of sand in the Western Desert about half a mile wide dividing the front lines of the British and Italian armies. I am told that the flames from my burning aircraft lit up the sand dunes for miles around, and of course not only the crash but also the subsequent bonfire were witnessed by the soldiers of both sides. The watchers in the trenches had been observing my antics for some time, and both sides knew that it was an RAF fighter and not an Italian plane that had come down. The remains, if any, were therefore of more interest to our people than to the enemy.

  When the flames had died down and the desert was dark, a little patrol of three brave men from the Suffolk Regiment crawled out from the British lines to inspect the wreck. They did not think for one moment that they would find anything but a burnt-out fuselage and a charred skeleton, and they were apparently astounded when they came upon my still-breathing body lying in the sand nearby.

  When they turned me over in the dark to get a better look, I must have swum back into consciousness because I can distinctly remember hearing one of them asking me how I felt, but I was unable to reply. Then I heard them whispering together about how they were going to get me back to the lines without a stretcher.

  The next thing I can remember a long time later was a man’s voice speaking loudly to me and telling me that he knew I was unable to see him or to answer him, but he thought there was a chance I could hear him. He told me he was an English doctor and that I was in an underground first-aid post in Mersah Matrûh. He said they were going to take me to the train by ambulance and send me back to Alexandria.

  I heard him talking to me and I understood what he was saying, and I also knew all about Mersah Matrûh and about the train. Mersah was a small town about 250 miles along the Libyan coast west of Alexandria, and our army had a most carefully preserved little railway running across the desert between the two places. This railway was a vital supply line for our forward troops in the Western Desert and the Italians were bombing it all the time but we somehow managed to keep it going. Everyone knew about the single-track railway-line that ran all the way along the coast beside the sparkling white beaches of the southern Mediterranean from Alex to Mersah.

  I heard voic
es around me as they manoeuvred my stretcher into the ambulance, and when the ambulance started to move forward over the very bumpy track, someone above me began screaming. Every time we hit a bump the man above me cried out in agony.

  When they were putting me on to the train, I felt a hand on my shoulder and a lovely Cockney voice said, ‘Cheer up, matey. You’ll soon be back in Alex.’

  The next thing I can remember was being taken off the train into the tremendous bustle of Alexandria Station, and I heard a woman’s voice saying, ‘This one’s an officer. He’ll go to the Anglo-Swiss.’

  Then I was inside the hospital itself and I heard the wheels of my stretcher rumbling softly along endless corridors. ‘Put him in here for the moment,’ a different woman’s voice was saying. ‘We want to have a look at him before he goes into the ward.’

  Deft fingers began to unroll the bandages around my head. ‘Can you hear me talking to you?’ the owner of the fingers was saying. She took one of my hands in hers and said, ‘If you can hear what I am saying, just give my hand a squeeze.’ I squeezed her hand. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘That’s fine. Now we know you’re going to be all right.’

  Then she said, ‘Here he is, doctor. I’ve taken off the dressings. He is conscious and is responding.’

  I felt the close proximity of the doctor’s face as he bent over me, and I heard him saying, ‘Do you have much pain?’

  Now that the bandages had been taken off my head, I found myself able to burble an answer to him. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No pain. But I can’t see.’